Fix "Strive to survive" game mode.

[FAIR]

After 8 attempts being an experienced Rimworld player this game mode is just unplayable. I wanted a challenge but giving catatonic state, muscular parasites and constant wildlife attacking my lone survivor plus 3 rides in 30 minutes is just stupid. It's supposed to be for experienced players but it's a total randomness of sever bad events one after the other. If these threats were "external" only like rides, wildlife, fires, would be acceptable but crippling my colonist in every round with diseases and immobilizing mental states from the early start is like shooting you in both legs and throwing you in a pool full of white sharks. The game mode description should say "waste your time in every attempt mode". Setup: no mods + Cassandra + rich explorer + strive to survive + perma death. Total waste of time.

[St3amfails]

I screwed up so bad my pawn is catatonic....wait i mean, im god at this game having played for 23 minutes so obviously the problem is that the game is random and unfair at intentionally random and unfair difficulty/scenerio combos. WAAAAAAAAH

[ROE]

Początkowo opublikowane przez inGe:

Początkowo opublikowane przez TSense:

Hey buddy, did you missed a zero on that or why are you trying to play with Cassandra? With Strive to survive on top of that?

I enjoy the challenge, what I don't enjoy, and the reason for the post, is when you are promised X and you get Y. I love the game, don't get me wrong, my only comment here is that if the difficulty is mostly random then why advertising something different. At this point I'm certain the state of the colonist is not a variable when calculating the difficulty. The "breathing time" the game is supposed to give you is based on the past events. What I've experienced is that you could have all your colonists catatonic and then IA will keep smashing you. Mental states and diseases/health apparently have no weight in the equation. I'm curios if the quests difficulty works like this as well. I way to test it I can imagine, would be waiting for a 1 star quest, then injure all your colonists and see if it gets updated. I don't have the willing nor the time to do this though.

I will state this again. Cassandra's job is to kill your colony. She will slowly chip away at you with small events that culminate in one final killer event that is designed to finish you off. If you have failed to counter her earlier attempts then you will be weakened to the point that you will fail and die. After that big event she takes a really long break and you begin to think that everything is cool. Then it all starts over again.

What you are failing to see is that you are getting exactly what you were promised. That is Cass. If she sees your colonists are catatonic then she is going to ram it up your ass and break it off. She is relentless pressure and she never stops.

If you want random then play Random Randy. His events are more like real life in that you never really know what he might throw at you. Three raids from different factions all at once, sure why not. He is an ♥♥♥♥♥♥♥ but he doesn't really care if he kills you or not. He is just doing his thing.

[Astasia]

Początkowo opublikowane przez inGe:

At this point I'm certain the state of the colonist is not a variable when calculating the difficulty.

That is mostly correct. Difficulty is almost entirely just a multiplier on threat, and threat is based almost entirely off colony wealth. Colonists do have a wealth value, that wealth is reduced if they are sick or injured, but colonist wealth is generally trivial compared to overall colony wealth so having sick colonists is usually not going to make any noticeable difference in raid sizes.

There is no intelligence to the storytellers, they aren't "trying" to do anything, they aren't paying attention to what you are doing, there is no logic behind their rolls. A storyteller is a scheduled sequence of dice rolls, different storytellers have a different schedule, difficulty does not factor into any of these rolls, how you are doing does not factor into any of these rolls, Casandra will send 1-2 major threats at you every 10.6 days with a 1.9 day minimum cooldown, forever, the end.

Difficulty changes the scaling on those threats, that's pretty much it. Instead of a x0.6 multiplier it's a x1.0 or x2.0 or x5.0.

This is what I meant in my first post by understanding the difficulty system before playing on a higher difficulty. Your assumption is the game would play fair, or give you some considerations, it doesn't. Your colonist gets sick, that's not a factor of the storyteller or difficulty (difficulty does change some scaling of disease events), that's a biome event, and that's not going to slow down or noticeably weaken the raids. You can't take anything for granted and have to always be prepared for the worst.

There is only one way the game will ease off you, if a colonist is downed this reduces a value called adapt days, which will temporarily reduce the scaling of events. It doesn't slow them down or stop events, it just makes them a little weaker, then it bounces back to full a few days later.

[Kittenpox]

755hrs. Still have plenty to learn.

OP, you've chosen a lone colonist as your starting group. ANYTHING which can incapacitate a pawn will screw you over, even without having selected Strive To Survive.

As someone who deals with mental health issues which get in the way of basic tasks, I understand your frustration at the pawn being unable to get stuff done because they're not coping with things. (You don't even want to know how long it took me to get a load of laundry done this morning IRL.)
But you have also specifically chosen a deliberately hard difficulty setting. Maybe you should ease back a step and enjoy the game, rather than metaphorically bashing your head against a wall*. Especially if you're going to disregard all warning signs indicating that success is not guaranteed AND you've deliberately chosen to accept all outcomes no matter how undesired by selecting a perma-death option.

You don't have anything you need to prove here, and this is Rimworld not Dark Souls. ^_^

--
* Unless that's your 'thing' I guess.